When bigger is not better. July 17, 2012

Silence Dogood here. I’m always astonished by the juxtaposition of horrors that confronts me each day when I open up the Yahoo! home page. First, there’s the news, full of stories of suffering, deprivation, homelessness, and starvation. And then there are the lifestyle features with their conspicuous consumption. Today we were treated to a feature on “The World’s Largest Peach Cobbler!”

But the worst was yet to come: a story of a couple who’d built an enormous mansion in Florida, ostentation for its own sake. They showed the hideous conglomeration in all its vulgarity—if memory serves, it has 40 rooms and nine kitchens—as well as a photo of the happy couple. The husband sat on a gold baroque throne that was worthy of the Sun King, smiling complacently. His trophy wife, settled on one arm of the throne, faced the camera defiantly, as if telling the world, “Hey, I earned this!”

Yesterday, there was a feature on Gwyneth Paltrow’s $90 tee-shirts and the Olsen twins’ $38,000 backpacks. And the Ecclestone sisters and their mind-boggling, $100-million-plus mansions have been making headlines in The WallStreet Journal. (One is currently adding a nightclub in one of her homes.)

I frankly don’t know how any of us sleep at night, given the state of the world around us. But I really don’t understand how these people are able to sleep! Give me a dollar tee-shirt from the thrift store any day.